An unknown observer is watching the residents of a small, closely-knit neighborhood in Cairo's old city, making notes of their comings and goings, their quarrels, their triumphs, descriptions of dress and biographical details. The college graduate, the street vendors, the political prisoner, the caf茅 owner, the taxi driver, the vegetable seller, the ironing man, the baker, the beautiful green-eyed young wife with the troll of a husband-all are subjects of surveillance. The watcher's reports flow seamlessly into a narrative about Zafarani Alley, a microcosm of Cairene urban life that is a village tucked into a corner of the city, where intrigue is the main entertainment, and everyone has a secret.
The mysterious Sheikh Atiya has cast a spell over Zafarani Alley, and the men are all cursed with a loss of virility; the women, gossiping on their balconies, are afflicted with despair. Suspicion, superstition, and a wicked humor prevail in this darkly comedic novel by the well-known writer and journalist, Gamal al-Ghitani, author of Zayni Barakat. Drawing upon the experience of his own childhood growing up in al-Hussein, where the fictional Zafarani Alley is located, he has created a world richly populated with characters and situations that possess authenticity behind their veils of satire.
The Zafarani Files (originally published as Waqa'i' Harat al-Za'farani, 1976. Trans. Farouk Abdel Wahab. Cairo; New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2009)
This early novel by one of Egypt鈥檚 most prolific short story and novel writers is a slapstick comedy set in Cairo鈥檚 teeming al-Hussein neighborhood, back in the days of Anwar Sadat (Egyptian president, 1970-1981). The crowded, run-down and entirely imaginary Zafarani alley is inhabited by 50 or more named and mostly zany characters, each obsessed in his or her own way by sexual performance (their own and all their neighbors') and their social standing. Normally, they tolerate one another's routines -- including the effendi (an honorific for the rare alley-dweller with a steady job and some high school education) who pimps his own wife, the virile and rustic baker who has found work as a male prostitute at the baths, the ancient sergeant major (retired) with his hallucinatory memories of serving the king and crown prince back before Nasser鈥檚 revolution, the alley鈥檚 only college graduate who dreams of swaggering around with a pistol, and their wives and mistresses whose greatest entertainment (besides sex, of which they are very demanding) is starting or watching their own loud and violent quarrels. The quarrels are mostly about who has the best sexual partner, but having the most impressive domestic appliances also boosts a woman鈥檚 status鈥� Sitt (鈥淢adame鈥�) Busayna, besides demanding daily intercourse from her beleaguered bus-driver husband, spends his money on outrageous luxuries like a transistor radio (the alley鈥檚 first 鈥� this is mid 1970鈥檚, remember) and even a many-buttoned washing machine!
But one day the mysterious gnomic sheikh who lives in a tiny, dark apartment at one end of the alley, and whom hardly anyone has ever seen, magically deprives the alley鈥檚 men of what they prize most: their sexual potency. He hints that this is just the first step of his world-changing program, by which he will end all quarrels and bring universal harmony. The pimp loses his customers, the male prostitute his job, the other men -- a taxi driver, a railroad coaler, a low-level bureaucrat, et al. -- their self-confidence, and the women have to resort to ever more desperate methods to get sexual satisfaction. Meanwhile, the government apparatus for political repression tries, with hopeless incompetence, to investigate these strange events while simultaneously denying to the world that anything unusual is occurring.
For a non-Arab reader it is hard to keep so many characters straight, especially since the names are often similar. For example, Nabil, Nabila and Umm Nabila are three different people, the first a young man that some of the local women fall in love with, the second a 26-year old female schoolteacher and unwilling spinster, and the third her mother -- "Umm" means "mother of," and may be followed by the name of either a daughter or a son. And inevitably, and despite the best efforts of the translator, English-readers will miss a lot of what must be jokes in Cairene slang and subtle political digs that must have been very naughty in the time of Anwar Sadat.
This work is a lot sillier than the better-known Naguib Mahfouz鈥檚 mythification of another Cairo alley (Children of Gebelawi, 1981) or his portrait of generational conflicts at the end of the Sadat period (The Day the Leader Was Killed, 2000), but its silliness is also sharp-edged satire. Al-Ghitani appears to have set out to scandalize everybody, religious sheikhs, pretentious bureaucrats, ignorant shopkeepers and tradesmen, women (though more gently), and the organs of the police state. The only characters who come across as reasonably sane are the "politico," possibly a Communist (or so the state bureaucracy imagines) just released from long imprisonment, the young man who visits him to learn about the world, and the sweet-natured wife of the merchant 鈥淩adish Head鈥� who escapes the alley and its ridiculous prejudices to parts unknown, though rumored to have run off to live with her English instructor.
And finally, nothing ever gets resolved. With so many characters, each with his own craziness, there is no central element holding them all together as a story except the sheikh's curse (or blessing, or whatever it's supposed to be). But we never find out what happens to the sheikh (or even whether he really exists as they imagine him) or with the curse of impotence, which may still be in effect in that fictitious alley.
Unfortunately, this is one of only three of al-Ghitani鈥檚 many novels available in English. He鈥檚 a writer we should know. Though ultimately The Zafarini Files fails to come to a satisfactory conclusion, it succeeds in amusing us by antics of its ineffectual and nutty characters, and gives us a glimpse of social conflicts in Cairo 30+ years ago. But maybe not so much has changed in Cairo and its al-Hussein neighborhood. Check out this April 14, 2008 article: A City Where You Can鈥檛 Hear Yourself Scream - New York Times ()
This book was quite a bit funnier than I expected.
I expected this to be a bit more 鈥渟lice of life鈥� as filtered through the goings-on in one alley in Egypt 鈥� and in a way it is 鈥� but it ends up being a lot more farcical than I expected. But I still felt that this provided a good snapshot of Egyptian life, as well as some interesting insight into the Egyptian psyche.
Told through a series of reports 鈥� seemingly brought together from multiple sources 鈥� the book chronicles an epidemic, of sorts, that begins to plague the residents of the Zafarani alley. I won鈥檛 get into more on that, mostly because the epidemic itself is fairly humorous.
The book can get a little over-tedious with the details every so often, but overall this was a very well written, fairly fast paced read.
Ok.... plowed my way through the book. It was interesting but I thought it a somewhat tedious read as the ending was predictable. The style, with long descriptive almost run-on sentences, lacked clarity in critical places (wandering off into insane and unrealistic portrayals of human behaviors) as well as cohesive development. Other "File" comments in the story appeared only too close to the very real absurdities that sometimes characterizes much of the human condition. I do wonder how someone with a knowledge of the culture views the book. I saw a lot of redundancy in the language which potentially could be, at least in part, a function of the translation process.
Feel like a satirical romp in Cairo? This is the book. Just when the marvelous character descriptions of the folks living in Zafarani Alley were beginning to seem a bit tedious.....zing! Major plot development takes the story to a new level. Basically this is about a universe inside a universe inside a universe, all of which are consistently absurd, and which seem filled with more conflict than resolution....until the Sheikh shakes things up for all! Excellent read!